As I hope readers know by now, the weekly schedule of this column is interrupted when IGN/FilmForce assigns me to report on some cartoon art-related event, most recently Cartoon Network’s “upfront” presentation on its Adult Swim programming. Now I can return to some works in progress for this column. But even before completing my trilogy on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again, I should deal with my comments and annotations on the penultimate issue of Neil Gaiman’s 1602 before the series’ conclusion finally arrives.

Initially I found the cover to 1602 #7 puzzling. There was Dr. Strange’s head, symbolically hovering over the ship in which other heroes cross the ocean through the unexplored darkness. So what is that red ribbon that comes out of his mouth and swirls above his head? It is like an enormous tongue. (No, smart alecks, I don’t believe this is an allusion to Marvel’s KISS books. More seriously, as we see later in the issue, Magneto’s minion the Toad also has a long tongue, but I don’t think there is a meaningful parallel there, either.) Perhaps it symbolizes speech: the message that Strange has to offer, following the information he gained from the Watcher in the previous issue.

It also alludes to a standard magician’s trick: producing ribbons and cloths from unexpected places, including one’s mouth.

Reading the issue reveals that Strange is not entranced on the cover, his eyes closed, or dreaming: he is beheaded in the course of the story. As we shall see, this supports the “speech” interpretation, since Strange’s spirit will have much to say after his physical demise. But now the red ribbon also represents a river of blood, with the lines on it denoting flowing water. The bright blood, denoting life escaping the body, contrasts with the nearly black waters below, which may be lifeless death.

A ribbon representing blood is also a traditional, stylized theatrical device: director Julie Taymor uses it in her work. This may serve to remind us that 1602 is a story, an artificial construct, and the concept of story becomes important by the issue’s end.

There is also the old image of the soul emerging from a person’s mouth at death with his last breath. (For modern uses of this artistic device, see Terry Gilliam’s film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and even the new Hellboy movie.) If the ribbon represents Strange’s soul, that would explain why it rises upward, in contrast with the ominous comet, which plunges through it towards the mortals on Earth.

The comet on the cover is a traditional signifier of major events that will radically alter the status quo. The Star of Bethlehem could have been a comet, for example. William Shakespeare, alive in 1602, repeatedly used strange disruptions of the usual natural order in his plays to symbolize social and political upheavals on Earth. The unusual phenomena in the skies in 1602 not only indicate on a literal level the forces that imperil all of reality in the story, but also fulfill this symbolic function. With Elizabeth I murdered, a malevolent James I having ascended the throne of England, Magneto openly defying established authority, and repression and religious persecution rampant, the world of 1602 would be in turmoil even without this cosmic sword of Damocles hanging over the cosmos.

Not until I started taking notes for this column did I notice that the constellations in the background represent characters from the story. Magneto especially looks here like the kind of figure from Greco-Roman mythology whom Westerners picture as a constellation. In Peter Parker’s case, the constellation takes the form of his symbol, his animal avatar, the spider. The deer, perhaps, is the still mysterious shapeshifter Virginia. (But who is the nude woman to the right?) This is a wonderfully ingenious new way of making the point that superheroes (and villains) represent a modern mythology, contemporary counterparts to the gods and heroes of classical myth.

Strange’s opening narration (or, if we pursue parallels to English Renaissance literature, his soliloquy), is another of Gaiman’s inventive ways of recapping complex continuity in this series.

It is odd that Strange can be held captive in a cell. (At times it has been claimed in his own series that Strange’s magic cannot affect physical things. Well, excuse me, but then what is the point of magic?) It is possible that Strange is not as powerful in this time, though surely he is still more powerful than Clea, who indicates later that she could easily rescue him if he had not forbidden it. But it becomes clear as the issue progresses that Strange has willingly allowed himself to be imprisoned and eventually executed. To save humanity and more, he had to give himself up to his enemies and sacrifice his life. (There’s a Christ motif here.)

Though Strange claims that the alien Watcher gave him a “vision of everything,” it does not extend to the identity of the Forerunner, the being whose arrival in this period triggered the approaching apocalypse (Hey! Another religious image!). But that makes sense: the Watcher could not reveal what he himself did not know.

The Forerunner arrived fifteen years ago, and Strange thinks it may be the girl Virginia. Of course! A teenage girl! I wondered why I had missed something so obvious, until I realized why I had unconsciously dismissed this red herring. It is because we were told she is the first “born” in the New World, so she is not a time traveler from the future.

Strange refers to the threat of the coming “darkness” that will spread “across everything there ever was, or is, or will be, rendering it down to pure nothingness. No heavens or hells, no worlds between.” Gaiman could have simply stated that the threat to the universe, if unstopped, will destroy it in 1602, but he goes further. He has conjured a particularly chilling vision of mortality, in that he specifies that there will be no hereafter, either: death will definitely mean oblivion, nonexistence. (This “darkness” is thus the opposite of the heavenly “light” that the dying are said to see and move towards.) Indeed, the “darkness” will obliterate time itself, it seems, so that all of creation never existed: it will be an eternity of nonexistence. Why does Gaiman go to such lengths in describing this peril? He could simply be trying to make his apocalyptic threat seem greater than the many others in past comics stories. Perhaps, since it has been established that the Marvel Universe has been established to extend to alternate realities and timelines, and that humans have spirits that survive after physical death, that Gaiman means to indicate that there is no means of escape from this impending catastrophe. Strange’s astral form will not survive it, nor will there be a divergent timeline in which the universe escaped the disaster. (I suspect that theologians would challenge the idea that a physical threat could actually have any effect on spiritual realms, but this is irrelevant as far as this story is concerned.)

In any case, religious themes have thus been introduced, and they will crop up repeatedly in this issue.

The Watcher imparted his “vision of everything” to Strange on the condition that for the rest of Strange’s life, he never tell anyone what he has learned. “While I live, my lips are sealed.” In 1602 the Watcher is like an oracle, a source of knowledge, who deals in riddles. This is one of them, and Strange must solve it.

The story shifts to Spain, where representatives of the Church are about to burn the captive Grand Inquisitor, who we know as Magneto, and his allies, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, at the stake. In the dialogue between Magneto and the lead clergyman, I am struck by its simple, conversational tone. Gaiman deals with understated villainy, the villain who speaks quietly rather than in the sort of bluster and threats that one traditionally expects from Marvel villains. Perhaps this is the only way to make the dialogue of these larger-than-life characters believable in today’s comics. The mode of speech that Stan Lee gave so many of his villains, which so many of his followers adopted, can seem corny and over the top. Yet it took a long time for comics writers to start to abandon this style. (For example, writer Peter Gillis, in his 1980s Eternals limited series, endowed his creation Ghaur, the high priest of the Deviant race, with a quiet, subtle yet menacing style of speaking. Every writer who subsequently used Ghaur ignored this, seemingly unable to comprehend a comics villain who did not speak in pompous bombast.)

Nonetheless, I suspect that something has been lost here. Stan Lee was aiming high with the disparate styles of dialogue he gave his characters. He may have consciously been inspired by Shakespeare, who could have noble characters speak in high poetry and low comic characters talk in prose and Elizabethan slang. In Stan Lee’s case, think of the comparable difference in the dialogue he gives the Silver Surfer and the Lee aimed at creating a heightened, stylized form of language for his grander characters, both heroes and villains, contrasting it with the colloquial, more realistic style he gave his everyman characters like Spider-Man. The language mirrored Lee’s fusion of the mythic and the everyday in his stories.

As the drawings make clear, Magneto is bound to a stake between the stakes to which his accomplices have been tied. Is this an ironic parallel to Christ crucified between the two thieves? This won’t seem so far-fetched in another few pages.

We learn that in the 1602 reality, Magneto’s first name is “Enrique,” a play on “Erik,” his alleged first name in mainstream Marvel continuity. (There was a story some years back that established that Magneto’s name “Erik Lehnsherr,” was merely an alias, but it’s as if I was the only one who read that story, inasmuch as it has been ignored by subsequent writers.)

The lead clergyman reveals that in this reality Magneto was “born a Jew, in the ghetto of Venice,” and in this speech, the clergyman makes the virulent anti-Semitism of that time quite clear.

It is by now a commonplace that the antagonism towards mutants in X-Men is a metaphor for racism. It has been pointed out that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the X-Men in the early 1960s, when the African-American civil rights movement was prominent in the news. It might be more relevant that Lee and Kirby were both Jewish-Americans; consciously or unconsciously, perhaps they were really aiming at anti-Semitism. Decades later, it was Chris Claremont who established that Magneto, as a child, had been imprisoned at Auschwitz. Although another X-Men issue that people seem ignorant of established that Magneto was a gypsy (like Doctor Doom!), the comics and X-Men movies now treat Magneto as Jewish.

Gaiman not only picks up on this, but uses it to point to the similarities between Magneto and a far more famous literary character, who was created not long before the year 1602. By establishing that the 1602 Magneto was born in Venice, Gaiman is surely referring to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and its dominant character, Shylock, another victim of anti-Semitism who, understandably pursues a bloody vengeance.

The clergyman burns off Enrique’s beard. Gaiman dies this in part for practical reasons: Enrique will soon don his familiar helmet, and Gaiman wants him to be recognizable as Magneto. Ridding Magneto of the beard throws off his “disguise” from the readers and also makes him look younger, in part one of his “rebirth” over the next pages.

And here is another aspect that may not have been intended by Gaiman. The burning off of Magneto’s beard echoes the way that the Human Torch burned off the amnesiac Sub-Mariner’s beard in Fantastic Four #4: in both cases the beardless man then reclaims his true identity and launches an assault on the human race.

Like the malevolent “vice” characters of Renaissance drama, Magneto is a trickster, and here he saves himself through a stunt out of the playbook of a later trickster, Br’er Rabbit. Magneto asks that his most precious belongings, including his helmet, be spared from the fire; naturally, as Magneto expected, the cruel clergyman instead places the helmet on the pyre.

(The helmet, by the way, is no anachronism: Jack Kirby seems to have based Magneto’s helmet on ancient Greek battle helmets.)

The churchman says that the helmet will burn as Enrique burns, thereby linking the two. The helmet is representative of Magneto’s true self. Through the burning of the helmet, which is unaffected by the flames, Magneto undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection.

Magneto then magnetically levitates the helmet, the sign of his power and identity onto his head, and breaks free of his bonds. It does not make literal sense that the helmet increased Magneto’s power enough that he could escape. Perhaps he could have broken free at any time and was merely putting on a show to cow his oppressors. But it makes sense metaphorically. Symbolically, Enrique has to be reborn into his Magneto identity to escape.

As Magneto frees himself, he extends his arms, taking on the familiar pose associated with the Crucifixion. As noted, this is an ironic parallel: Magneto is certainly no Christ figure, though he may think of himself as mutantdom’s savior. In freeing himself while mimicking the Crucifixion, Magneto creates the image of simultaneous death and resurrection.

Magneto continues the theme of rebirth through comparing himself with a “butterfly” emerging from its “chrysalis”: he has ascended to a more powerful state of being.

Now the story shifts to the Eagle’s Shadow, the ship carrying many of 1602‘s heroes to the New World. Perhaps there is an allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest here, inasmuch as Prospero’s island is thought to have been inspired by newly discovered islands across the Atlantic. Or perhaps this journey is meant to evoke the emigration of Englishmen, many of whom felt themselves to be outcasts in Britain, to new homes in America. Even if Gaiman has recast these well-known Marvel heroes as Europeans in 1602, these characters are American creations, after all. (Perhaps this even reflects Gaiman’s own transition from his life in England to his eventual settling in the United States.)

It’s a nice touch that the 1602 version of Bobby Drake, the X-Men’s Iceman, turns out to be a relative of the Elizabethan explorer Sir Francis Drake.

Here it becomes clear that the 1602 Fantastic Four don’t have their modern-day uniforms made of “unstable molecules” that adapt to their powers: Reed’s clothes do not stretch along with him. The series seems to suggest that Sue, the Invisible Woman, wears nothing when invisible because she cannot turn clothing invisible. (In fact, according to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this is irrelevant since Sue achieves invisibility by bending light around herself.)

In 1602 America is a wilderness, so it makes sense that Gaiman has turned it into the 1602 version of Marvel’s own primeval realm, Ka-Zar’s Savage Land, populated by prehistoric beasts. The Thing refers to its “hairy oliphaunts,” meaning woolly mammoths. Can this also be a subtle allusion to the “oliphaunts” in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings?

PBS recently telecast the series In Search of Shakespeare, which pointed out that Elizabethan England was, in host Michael Wood’s words, a “police state” and mentioned Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Sir Thomas Walsingham. Presumably Nicholas Fury, in 1602 holds the role that Walsingham filled in actual history, and the PBS series showed me the context in which to place Gaiman’s depiction of spies, intelligence gathering, the search for traitors, and the state’s use of torture in 1602. (The series also emphasized that Catholicism was outlawed in Elizabethan England, another example of the religious persecution that is one of 1602‘s subjects.)

Here Fury makes a speech that demonstrates the fate of those who fall from power in such a state: he is branded a traitor, his possessions have been confiscated, and his allies will be executed. (Actually, Fury has suffered a severe form of the fate that many members of established orders face when a new regime from outside takes over.) Fury makes the point that he chose personal loyalty – to the Queen and to Reed – over allegiance to James’s new order. As I observed about a previous issue, Gaiman seems to be emphasizing that the classic Marvel heroes can become outcasts because they stand for a moral code that may put them at odds with the established order.

Now religion raises its head once more: Fury speaks of the time when he will “meet my maker,” and Reed chimes in, “As we all shall.” One would not ordinarily think of Reed Richards, the man of science, and Nick Fury, the political realist, as being among the Marvel heroes most likely to be men of religious faith, but in 1602 they are. The previous issue established Carlos Javier (the X-Men’s Charles Xavier) to be deeply religious as well. These three men’s spirituality is presented much more positively than that of the institutional churches, the Catholic Church in Spain and the Church of England in Britain, both of which deal in religious persecution and bigotry. The 1602 Reed and Fury believe in a moral God and a life after death.

We have previously been told that King James’s aide is named “Banner,” so he must be the 1602 counterpart to Bruce Banner, the Hulk. With only one issue to go, it seems unlikely that this Banner will undergo a monstrous transformation. Perhaps this Banner’s role in 1602, as the underling of a malevolent ruler, is meant as a comment on Dr. Bruce Banner’s original role as a nuclear scientist who, without questioning its morality, develops a weapon of mass destruction for the U. S. government.

In this issue we learn that King James’s Banner is named “David”: I will assume that “Bruce” was not used as a first name back then, so Gaiman has chosen to nod to the “David Banner” of the Hulk TV show instead.

In explaining to Virginia why they cannot openly use supernatural means to rescue Strange, Clea speaks of James’s antagonism towards magicians; this is another example of the pervasive prejudices depicted in this series.

The Angel, it turns out, is the only character aboard the eagle’s shadow who did not realize that “Master Grey” was really a girl, whom we know as Jean Grey. This certainly makes Angel look stupid; if no one else aboard was fooled, one might wonder what the point of her disguise was. (Later, Angel refers to Jean as “the boy I so wanted to believe in.” Is Gaiman possibly implying that the 1602 Angel is gay, then?)

Gaiman is surely alluding to the Shakespearean device of girls masquerading as boys here: in Shakespeare’s plays this trick enables young women – Viola, Rosalind, Portia – to exercise a freedom of action that is not permitted to women of their time. Perhaps Gaiman’s point is that a girl could not be a part of a team of adventurers in this time unless she disguised herself as a boy. (This prejudice does not stop 1602‘s Susan Storm from being an adventurer; then again, she’s invisible, so no one literally sees her defying social customs.) Maybe it’s even Gaiman’s joke on the fact that though this team of mutants has virtually always included at least one woman, Marvel has always called it the X-Men.

From excessive exertion of her powers in the previous issue, Jean now dies, in a sequence superior or more affecting than the recent “death scene” Jean had in contemporary continuity in New X-Men #150. (Since Jean has “died” and returned before, it’s hard to think that her “death” in New X-Men #150 will prove to be permanent.)

Imprisoned in the Tower of London, Peter Parquagh – the 1602 counterpart of Peter Parker – again watches an animal symbol of his modern day self, a spider. Banner tells Peter a story about the Scots rebel, “the Bruce” (This is appropriate from Banner’s mouth!), who saw the spider as a symbol of heroic perseverance and survival; whether this story is Gaiman’s invention or not, I do not know, but it presumably tells us how Gaiman regards Spider-Man’s celebrated devotion to his responsibility.

Strange’s execution comes as a surprise, in part because of Gaiman’s subtle handling: the beheading happens off panel, and when Clea is reunited with Strange on the next page, it may take a bit of time to realize that Strange’s head is no longer connected to his body. One never expects one of the heroes to die, though presumably the finale of 1602 will somehow undo Strange’s death, and perhaps this series’ entire version of the events of 1602 in the Marvel Universe.

The lights in the sky, this time described as being like “a hundred comets,” not only signal the coming end of the world, but in this case, specifically show the cosmos reacting in Shakespearean manner to the unjust death of a great man, Strange.

One of the guards mockingly pretends to tell another, “Harry, I am thy father’s ghost, come to see thee repent of thy whoremongering ways. . . .” I expect that the first guard has seen Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, and, perhaps not having the best of memories for the popular entertainment of his time, has conflated father and son relationships from both into his little joke.

Strange’s head can still telepathically project his thoughts until “darkness takes me”: though Strange spoke of heavens before, he is not here picturing a meeting with his maker, as Fury and Reed did. (Possibly Strange is simply referring to the coming “darkness” that will destroy all of time and space.) Clea kisses Strange’s severed head, but I don’t think that a reference to either Oscar Wilde’s or Richard Strauss’s Salome is intended (not unless Clea is the naked woman on the cover, which seems unlikely). Sandman aficionados will surely recall the living, severed head of Orpheus, however.

Clea notes that “the dead speak only in riddles,” raising the riddle theme once more. Here we learn how Strange solved the Watcher’s riddle: since Strange could not speak of what he learned from the Watcher while he lived, then Strange had to allow himself to be killed. Physically dead, Strange can now convey the information to Clea. I suppose that Strange is also not technically “speaking” the information, since he is communicating telepathically. (But couldn’t he have done that while he was still alive?) But why did the Watcher place such a cruel condition on Strange? Did he want Strange to die, and if so, why?

Actually, though Clea claims the dead Strange is speaking in riddles, he does not do so intentionally: neither of them know who “the Forerunner” is who must be sent back to its own time. In the manner of Sandman’s Lady Johanna Constantine, Clea rescues this sentient severed head from captivity amid a political reign of terror and carries it off.

Clea’s references to being a “queen,” whom Strange freed, “far beyond the veils of this world,” is a reference to the classic Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Dr. Strange storyline in which Clea is the princess of the Dark Dimension, tyrannically ruled by the Dread Dormammu. Dormammu already existed in the year 1602, so he did not need to be displaced through time: he simply met Strange several centuries earlier. (Exactly how old Clea is chronologically is a question that has never been addressed.)

As part of her funeral ceremony, the Human Torch sets Jean’s body afire in mid-air, and the Angel says he “imagined” – and we actually see – the gigantic image of a fiery bird: “Something huge. Something strange. Something beautiful.” This is the manifestation of the Phoenix force, which Gaiman describes in terms of the 19th century concept of the sublime: the beauty of the fearsome. Possibly the Phoenix image represents Jean’s released spirit, although since the Angel says he imagined it, we cannot be certain it is there; perhaps he is somehow drawing on the memories of his “real,” contemporary self.

As I have observed in previous columns, in 1602 Gaiman confines himself to the characters of Marvel’s Silver Age of the 1960s, those that Stan Lee wrote., and the characterizations he gave them. But Gaiman makes two exceptions to this rule by tipping his hat to the work of two of the most important writers to follow Lee on his creations. Though Gaiman primarily follows Lee’s lead in portraying Daredevil as a witty “daredevil” swashbuckler in the mode of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, he also invests him, especially in the first issue, with the mysterious, noir-based “devil” aspect of Frank Miller’s Daredevil. And with the apparition of the Phoenix, even more so than with his discourse on Magneto’s background, Gaiman salutes Chris Claremont, who turned Jean Grey into the human embodiment of the Phoenix force.

Now comes what I consider to be the heart of the seventh issue. Reed theorizes that the “fundamental particles” or, perhaps more precisely, the “fundamental principles” of the universe are “Stories. And they give me hope.”

As with Reed’s evocation of God, this is not something one might ordinarily expect the modern day version of Reed Richards to say. The 1602 Reed is speaking of a philosophical concept as if it were a scientific theory. He is contending that in the Marvel Universe, it is fact that progressions of events tend to fall into the form of stories. In other words, existence is not a series of accidents; the course of events is directed and planned. “Yet I posit we are in a universe which favours stories. A universe in which no story can ever truly end; in which there can be only continuances.”

So who or what is formulating these stories?

On one level, the 1602 Reed is a character who, through his genius, has deduced that he exists within a fictional universe, an artificial construct. Reed is a character in the Marvel Universe, an enormous body of interconnected stories. Neil Gaiman is the presiding intelligence governing the events of the current story, 1602, but the character of Reed will go in to appear in other stories, planned out by other writers, probably for many decades to come.

Then, perhaps, the Marvel Universe is a better universe than the real one in which we dwell. In real life, we have no guarantees as to how our lives will progress, and our individual life stories inevitably end in death. Reed senses, however, that his universe will not end because stories do not end: one story leads into another. Though Reed does not say so, this means that an individual’s story may never end, either. A character is likely to survive any present dangers in order to go on to the next story. (Even many comics characters who die, like Jean Grey, eventually return to life.)

The Human Torch, more cynical than Reed, sees these implications of his argument. “You’re talking rot, Reed. Poor Jean Grey’s story is over. Von Doom’s story is done. All tales end. And our world will end likewise.” In other words, everything will end in death. (This seems to echo what Gaiman has told us in Sandman about Death of the Endless, that she will be the last surviving being in the universe, although she is intentionally vague on the matter of what, if anything, lies beyond death.)

Now,. even in terms of what we have already seen in 1602, the Torch may be wrong. Doom was still alive, if barely, when we last saw him. And, as noted, perhaps Jean’s spirit continues to exist as the Phoenix Force. Again, recall that Reed and Fury have both spoken of an afterlife: they believe that in their universe, the hereafter is a reality. They also both referred to “their maker,” God, who would be the Writer of the stories of their lives and their universe.

Now, does Reed’s theory apply to the universe in which we readers exist as well? It depends on your point of view on religious matters.

Here again there are connections to be made with Gaiman’s previous comics work. For one thing, Morpheus, the Sandman, is the patron of storytellers and stories. And then there is Morpheus’s brother Destiny and his book. All of the past, present and future are written in Destiny’s book: though we do not know who does the writing, this implies that it is written and preordained. So the DC Universe also follows a “story.” And if Destiny’s book is meant as a metaphor for the workings of fate within our real universe, it too functions according to plan, not according to accident.

Ben asks Reed if he could transform him back from monster into normal human form. Reed replies that “the laws of story would suggest that no cure can last for very long,” since Ben is “much more interesting and satisfying” as the Thing.

This, of course, has proved true for the Thing throughout the history of his stories: his cures never last for long. So here Reed once again speaks of his universe as if it were a fictional construct. Still, a believer in an ordered universe might likewise believe that Ben’s cures could not last if it was necessary for him to remain the Thing in order to fulfill his destiny in a “satisfying” manner.

Just as the Angel “imagined” seeing the Phoenix, now Peter has a dream in which he swings from tree to tree. “I am more free and more alive than any man has ever been,” Peter thinks. He is, of course, imagining (remembering?) himself as Spider-Man. In part Gaiman is pointing out the difference between the introverted, brooding Peter, weighed down by his personal problems, and his other self, the extroverted, high-spirited Spider-Man. Gaiman’s reference to Spider-Man as “more free. . .than any man has ever been” reminds me of Frank Miller’s use of superheroes in The Dark Knight Strikes Again as symbols of individual freedom. Like Miller’s work, 1602 also has a political context. Miller states that his superheroes have to be “criminals” under a repressive government, and in 1602 King James treats all the heroes as traitors and outlaws.

In his dream Peter imagines himself swinging from trees because he cannot envision the skyscrapers of a later century. But I wonder if Gaiman is also linking the web-swinging Spider-Man to the vine-swinging Tarzan, himself an Englishman who has escaped the confinements of conventional society. The 1602 Captain America is likewise linked to Tarzan: a white man who grew up in the wilderness and mastered it. (The fact that the 1602 Cap’s wilderness is the Savage Land, realm of Ka-Zar, who is clearly a Tarzan analogue, makes the connection even clearer.)

Perhaps 1602 is pointing to Tarzan as a forebear of the superhero concept.

Fury’s, Reed’s and Javier’s positive view of God contrasts sharply with the one that King James now presents to Peter: James sees God as his excuse for persecuting whomever the king hates, just as Magneto’s adversary earlier in the issue used religion as his rationale for attacking Jews and “witchbreed” (mutants). This churchman accused Magneto of rejecting God’s mercy; James sees himself as embodying “God’s will.” Through James 1602‘s theme of bigotry and repression reaches its peak.

He obsessively sees traitors everywhere: “It’s all plots and plans and treacheries, laddie.” By this point, mutants, Catholics, Jews, “witches,” loyalists to the previous ruler, and, yes, superheroes, have been lumped together as traitors either to Church, state, or both. (I am reminded of Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier, which, building on a previous Justice Society of America story by Paul Levitz, shows the political witchhunts of the McCarthy era putting an end to the Golden Age of superheroes.) In having James justify himself by stating that “A king is God’s anointed,” Gaiman thereby political oppression with religious oppression, and alleged heretics with alleged traitors.

In an earlier issue Fury considered using torture on a captive, but decided against it. This issue 1602 clearly links torture with evil and oppression, not just through the attempt to burn Magneto at the stake and Strange’s beheading, but most dreadfully through James’s sadistic fantasizing about having Fury drawn and quartered

James threatens Peter that his Uncle and Aunt’s hearts would break (literally) if Peter were to die “a traitor’s death.” Faced with this prospect, Peter accedes to James’s will. But readers should recall the earlier speech about the spider’s persistence; I expect that in issue eight Peter will make his characteristic decision about the requirements of “great responsibility.”

It is fun to see how artist Andy Kubert now dresses Magneto in believable period garments that nonetheless evokes the present-day Magneto’s costume. It is even more amusing that Gaiman has Magneto name his new alliance “The Brotherhood of. . .” and then hesitates.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had called Magneto’s team “the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants,” but the word “mutant” did not exist in 1602; besides, Gaiman may be subtly acknowledging the improbability that the self-righteous Magneto would actually call his group “evil.”

On the final page, Clea accuses Rojhaz, the Caucasian who acts as an American Indian, of being the Forerunner who came from the future. With that Rojhaz drops his stereotypical broken English and speaks in what is clearly the English of our own time, right down to addressing Clea as “Ms. Strange.” (And what a relief that we were not to take Rojhaz’s politically incorrect, proto-Tonto brand of English seriously!) It is not a surprise that Rojhaz is Captain America; the surprise is that, unlike the other transplanted Marvel heroes, he remembers his 21st century self.

Cap/Rojhaz is supposed to have been in the past for fifteen years, yet he does not seem to have aged a bit: it must be the Super-Soldier serum at work.

As for Cap’s being the Forerunner of the Marvel heroes, well, the Sub-Mariner and the original Human Torch both predated Cap in comics’ “Golden Age.” But the original Torch, apart from a one-shot appearance in Fantastic Four Annual #4, was not part of Silver Age Marvel as well, and Namor, with his one-man terrorist attacks on the surface world, was hardly a conventional superhero. Though a Golden Age creation, Cap also embodies the spirit of the Silver Age Marvel heroes, so I can see Gaiman’s thematic point in making him the Forerunner. (And I wonder how many other readers had dismissed Cap as a suspect and were busy trying to find Namor instead.)

Will any other familiar Marvel characters, as yet unseen in 1602, appear in the final issue? I observe that Gaiman has avoided unsubtle allusions to his past work: the 1602 Strange did not encounter or even mention Nightmare, Silver Age Marvel’s own dream lord. I do not expect that when the Eagle’s Shadow lands that part of the beach will turn into the Stan Lee-Steve Ditko Sandman character, either.

Of the major Silver Age Marvel heroes, the most obvious one missing is Iron Man. I have been informed by one reader that Neil Gaiman stated in an interview that he couldn’t come up with a role for Iron Man’s alter ego, Anthony Stark, other than the obvious one of a man in a suit of armor.

Well, maybe I can come up with one. In the 1960s Tony Stark worked with Nick Fury at SHIELD, designing that organization’s weaponry and high tech equipment. Perhaps in 1602 Stark could have been Fury’s weaponer, as well as Peter’s mentor in science. Or, the Stark of the 1960s was also a munitions maker: like Bruce Banner, he was a servant of the American military-industrial complex, and, also like Banner, was nearly killed as a result: Stark stepped on the booby trap that injured his heart while he was on a mission in Asia observing his combat equipment in action. Could Stark have been another of King James’s aides, like Banner? Or could he have been working in the service of Doom, perhaps unwillingly, designing his weapons of mass destruction or even his armor? Perhaps Doom would have forced a wounded Stark to serve him, in an echo of Iron Man’s origin, in which Stark’s captors forced the dying man to create weaponry for them?

I somehow thought that 1602 would be a longer series, but here we are at issue seven with only one more remaining. Even considering the extra length of the final installment, can Gaiman really wrap up such a complicated tale in a single issue? It would seem that there is still so much to be done that it does not feel as if we are near the end. Well, we shall soon see.

In theorizing that the universe is comprised of “Stories. And they give me hope,” Reed gives a further indication that 1602 is part of what I have called the “Neo-Silver” movement in contemporary comics.

Perhaps this is a good point to explain further what I mean by this term. I do not mean the works of comics writers who are simply recycling variations on old Stan Lee stories as if the superhero genre and American comics had not evolved since the 1960s. This is the kind of work, which we have seen starting in the 1970s, that ended up reading like third, fourth, or fifth generation dupes of a videotape, and provoked such a strong reaction against Silver Age-style material from the mid-1980s on. Nor do I mean the attempted “reboots” of Silver Age series, in which the “rebooters” claim to be honoring the original stories, but make severe alterations in characterization and continuity that violate not just the letter but the spirit of the original tales.

In contrast, the writers and artists of “Neo-Silver” works have recognized and assimilated the more sophisticated developments in the medium since the 1960s and reinterpret the Silver Age characters and stories from that standpoint. They respect the achievements and intentions of the great writers and artists of the past, and attempting to recapture the spirit of their works for a new generation.

I propose that the first true “Neo-Silver” work emerged at the very time that the legacy of the Silver Age was under severe attack in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths: it was Alan Moore’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” his 1986 hail and farewell to the Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz Superman continuity, as I shall show in a future column.

So, too, 1602 neither debunks nor condescends towards the classic 1960s Marvel heroes; it does not distort their morality nor set the characters in a cynical or nihilistic world. One of its themes, as Reed states, is “hope”; others, enunciated elsewhere in issue seven, are loyalty, love, moral responsibility, heroic sacrifice, and the persistence “to keep on fighting forever” if need be. Just as Gaiman has transposed the classic Marvel heroes of the 1960s back into the 1600s, so too he has found a way to faithfully reinterpret their moral agenda for a contemporary readership. Created in the 1960s, the classic Marvel heroes are shown in 1602 to be timeless, able to fit into the early 17th century as well as into the early 21st.

-Copyright 2004 Peter Sanderson

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